THE FROZEN MOMENT

Is that all there is?

Is that all there is?

If that's all there is, my friend

than let’s keep dancing

Let’s break out the booze and have a ball

If that’s all…there is

- Peggy Lee

There were a few nights where the passage from dusk to dawn was something like an elemental journey… where situations, emotions and actions could change tenor on a dime… slingshot from joviality to mayhem to fear to calm... these were nights where nothing much happened in the world beyond the playgrounds of music, weed, beer, etc… but among such common elements there was a dare of sorts — all teetered on the edge of an abyss.

These nights ended with the light of dawn creeping over a fatigued face. A face at the tail-end of a spectacular bender. The face of a figure awash in that moment, hangover incipient, where one is witness to an edge between realities. A moment which arrives drunk on itself and dizzy with a will to maintain.

This face is not unlike the face of some early primitive, staring up at the night sky. Defiant of the endless canopy stretched high above his brief gesture. His is a face that is bloodied-but-unbowed. A face giddy at the terror of an open possibility: of an infinite moment. On his face I place a harlequin-death-mask to best show his emotion in its raw being. In its elemental grace. He lives in the Frozen Moment. A moment that arrives like a single frame of film.

It clatters toward the dawn, fumbles dizzily at the edge and rallies stubbornly...

Blog Archive

LINKS

"Skepticism, as a disposition, arises from desire, not contempt." – Anon.

THE NEW WAY

“…Something in my mind shifted to the other extreme, suggesting infinitely dimensioned space ...but then, it was all a metaphor of desperation. Truly and simply, I did not understand anything about it. I had only a growing feeling – pattern-conditioned? Instinctive? – that I had to pass through this maze to gain the new degree of power that I sought.”– Roger Zelazny's Amber Chronicles [paraphrased]

STATEMENT

A meditation on the waning days of western metaphysics via the art-historical trope of the harlequin—this time re-imagined as a Black Metal-music reveler. These are corpse painted figures imbibing in a bacchanal of alcohol and religious euphoria. They are the Freudian Id, loosed and drunk with a mal-appropriated spirituality.

Using structures of iconic, Christian painting and the illuminated manuscript, the work endeavors to create a confluence of reverence and irreverence. These paintings strive to depict a desire for meaning, faced with the fear that meaning has ultimately receded in our world.

Think of it as a gnostic conversation (albeit a drunken conversation) ...an "after party" of civilization's metaphysical/religious beliefs.